Arlington National Cemetery’s relaxed policy on personal mementos left at the graves of those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be stopped by the end of 2014, an advisory commission recommended Tuesday to the secretary of the Army.

The committee, led by Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran and former U.S. senator, said it was fitting to end the exception to the cemetery-wide policy — which allows only flowers and small photographs at grave markers — as troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan.

Families of service members buried in the cemetery’s Section 60 objected this fall when grounds crews began removing laminated photos, colored stones and other personal items that had been left at grave sites. Someone had epoxied a ceramic commemorative coin to the back of a headstone, and other grave sites were adorned with collections of personally significant items, including football helmets, letters, liquor bottles and painted stones.

A truce, negotiated in October, allowed families with loved ones in Section 60, where the fallen from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, to leave a small photo and a handmade memento on the graves through April, when the cemetery resumes its normal grass-cutting routine.

The recommendation, made after hours of discussion Tuesday, would allow the exception to continue through 2014 for Section 60. Any handmade items can be placed by the grave, but after next year they would be removed and disposed of when routine cemetery maintenance occurs.

“While there are families with individual ways of grieving, we have an obligation to preserve for future generations consistent standards at Arlington National Cemetery,” said Chet Edwards, a commission member and a former Democratic congressman from Texas. “What’s been harder and harder for us to defend is there’s a standard for Section 60 and even within Section 60.”

He said some families had gone so far as to decorate graves with wind chimes and holiday lights. Family representatives acknowledged that those items distracted from Arlington’s solemn atmosphere. But they said they should be able to leave tasteful mementos to honor their loved ones.

“This is part of our grieving process,” said Paula Davis, whose son Justin is buried there. “It might be generational. We personalize the graves. We don’t just stand there and pray.”

But staff said the practice of leaving items at grave sites was spreading to other areas of the cemetery. Arlington’s familiar views of row upon row of white gravestones, marking 150 years of service in the American military, should be preserved, commission members said.

Arlington Cemetery has about 300,000 headstones, and more than 2,000 active-duty military have been buried there since Sept. 11, 2001. Section 60 is one of five areas were burials are being conducted, but its 18 acres also contain graves of veterans of the Vietnam War, the Korean War and World War II.

Since 2009, about 28,000 items had been collected from Section 60, cemetery staff told the commission, and some have been stored for a possible future memorial. The commission directed the staff to make recommendations in the spring for a strategy on whether and how to use digital tools to better tell the stories of people buried there.

Ami Neiberger-Miller, a spokeswoman for TAPS, a nonprofit organization that works with families that have lost relatives serving in the military, said the commission did not understand “families grieving early, traumatic deaths.” She said that the idea of using technology to memorialize the dead was a good one but that families still need to be able to bring their loved ones items that carry meaning.

“Children do not color pictures for Daddy and leave them on the Internet,” she said. “They leave them at the grave site.”